Dr. Fred Craddock tells the story of an annual Easter tradition at one church in Georgia. Every year, on Easter Sunday, the church was decorated with 500 Easter lilies! The lilies were arranged on the chancel in the shape of a cross, placed in each window of the church, across the altar rail, across the front of the baptistry – literally everywhere you looked on Easter morning, you could see Easter lilies! Each year, members of the church were given the opportunity to have one of the lilies placed there in honor or memory of a loved one for a contribution of $5. Only $5! And you didn’t even have to take them home with you after the service. The church would dispose of them. Everyone just assumed that they were taken to shut-ins and hospitals and the like.

All went well until one Easter Sunday, after the worship service, a dear, sweet lady went back into the sanctuary after church. "I have an aunt who is in a nursing home," she said, "so if you don’t mind, I’d like to take my lily to her. I’ll just pick one out." Before anyone could stop her, she took one of the Easter lilies out of the window next to where she was standing. And in a voice loud enough to be heard in the farthest reaches of the church parking lot, she exclaimed with horror and dismay, "Oh, my God! It’s PLASTIC!" People rushed back into the sanctuary and began looking closely at all the Easter lilies, only to discover that every last one of the lilies was plastic!

There was a called board meeting the next night. The pastor and the chairman of the board felt as if they facing a firing squad, as one church member after another shot questions at them. "Just how long has this been going on?" "Where do you hide 500 plastic Easter lilies?" And the one question asked repeatedly: "What happened to all those $5 contributions?"

The chairman tried to explain that the money had not been used for dishonest purposes, that each year half of the money raised from Easter lily donations was placed in the general fund of the church. The other half was sent to denominational headquarters, to be used to finance mission work in Africa and South America and other places around the world. The pastor chimed in and said, "Yes, and do you know what usually happens to real Easter lilies, after the Easter Sunday service? Most people just take them home and water them for a few days, until the blooms fall off. Then they just get thrown away. We just thought that was a terrible waste, and you wouldn’t want to waste Easter, would you?"

I don’t want to condone dishonesty, but the pastor had a good point. Easter is a terrible thing to waste. And yet…

In the calendar of the church year, today is the Seventh Sunday of Easter. Did you realize it’s been seven weeks since Easter Sunday? Seven weeks since the sanctuary was filled with the symbols of resurrection life – the flowers (and I assure you, they were real), the smiling faces of our children, all dressed up in their Easter finery, the little extra bounce that was in our step, the exuberant music, the excitement… All that is gone now. And the questions, even if we don’t ask them out loud, have begun to creep into our consciousness. Why didn’t we have bigger crowds at the special Easter services? How did all the energy and enthusiasm vanish with the scent of the lilies? What do we do now that the excitement has died down?

Easter is over. By now, seven Sundays later, that’s not exactly a hot news flash, is it? Easter is over. And what has happened in our world since Easter Sunday? In Europe, people are still being forced to leave their homes and all their belongings behind and flee from an oppressive, corrupt government, and the bombs are still falling all around them. Here at home, the near hysteria over the "Y2K" problem continues, and it’s scaring the daylights out of a lot of folks. It seems to me that the greatest problem with "Y2K" will be people’s fear, not any computer malfunction. Then we had to face the terrible events of Littleton, Colorado, children killing other children, for little or no reason at all. In the Midwest, yet another round of violent tornadoes destroyed 3,000 homes in Oklahoma and Kansas, and 41 people lost their lives.

All of these events have left many Christians feeling and believing that maybe Easter WAS wasted this year, that things couldn’t get much worse, and they are wondering, asking, "Jesus, when are you coming back? Don’t you think it’s time now?"

The members of First Church, Jerusalem, were also facing difficult times, anxious times. The excitement and exhilaration of Easter had begun to die down. They still lived with the fear that the leaders of the synagogue who had instigated the arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus would come for them next. Then there was Jesus himself, who was supposed to be dead, but had somehow come back to life. And he had this disturbing habit of appearing when you were in a locked room, or out walking on a lonely road, as if out of nowhere, and you just never knew when he was going to show up! His disciples must have wondered, "Why is Jesus wasting this wonderful opportunity? Why doesn’t he just appear in the middle of Jerusalem on market day, or at a meeting of the Sanhedrin and show EVERYONE that he’s back, just as he promised? That would shake things up down at the synagogue for sure! Peter, wouldn’t you just love to see the look on old Caiaphus’ face if Jesus walked into the room, smiling, waving, and said, ‘Hello, Brother Caiaphus? How are you today? Isn’t it a beautiful morning? This is the kind of day that makes you feel great to be ALIVE, isn’t it? Peace be with you, brother.’ I’ll bet that old buzzard would be sorry then! Wouldn’t it be just awful to waste the resurrection?"

But the resurrected Jesus did not confront those who had brought about his death, saying, "Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah! You couldn’t kill me!" Instead he appeared only to those who had followed him faithfully before the crucifixion.

And then his disciples asked him, "Lord, is it at this time You are restoring the kingdom to Israel?"

The perceptions of disciples of every age and era of exactly what is to be restored has a tendency to be not exactly in line with what God has in mind. Back in the glory days of Israel, during the reign of King David, Israel was a force to be reckoned with by her neighbors, even envied by them. Israel was respected back then, and yes, by golly, even FEARED! People took notice. The people of David’s day enjoyed a sense of supremacy that comes with high national status. And the people liked that. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The disciples of Jesus longed for a return to that golden era of yesterday. They wanted to feel good about themselves again, to walk with their heads held high, proud to be an Israelite. That was their interpretation, their expectation of what would happen with the coming of the Messiah.

With our modern-day Easter excitement, we look toward a restoration of what the church is supposed to be in all its glory – that is, what WE think the church should be: a strong influence in the community, a political entity to be reckoned with. After the excitement of Easter Sunday has faded, the church asks, "Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to the church? We want to decide who gets elected to public office and who doesn’t, and we have a really good system for determining the worthiness of a candidate. We want to decide what our children get taught in school. Oh, sure, there are some whose feelings might get hurt by some of the things we want our teachers to say to our children about what they’re supposed to believe about You and how they’re supposed to treat unbelievers and weirdos and homosexuals. But, hey, we didn’t create the problem! We’re just trying to solve it. And we’ve got some really good ideas. So how about it, Lord? Isn’t it time you restored the church to power? You wouldn’t want to waste another Easter, would you, Lord?"

And Jesus says to us, as he said to those first disciples so long ago, "Oh, don’t you worry about that. You don’t need that kind of power and you don’t need to know when God is going to establish the kingdom. It may have already happened and you just missed it. That happened once before, you know? God’s taking care of all that. What YOU need to do is focus your energies on telling other folks about me and about how much God loves them. You go on back to Jerusalem now, and wait for the Holy Spirit – the Comforter I promised to send you, remember? After the Spirit comes upon you, you’ll know what to do. I’m going home now. Bye, y’all!"

What a helpless feeling must have descended upon His disciples as they watched Jesus being lifted up to heaven! They stood there, staring until he was out of sight, perhaps hoping he would change his mind and come back down. "Wait, Jesus! You weren’t supposed to leave us again! Come back!" And then, to further add to their emotional turmoil, two men in white clothing appear out of nowhere, saying, "Why are you standing there looking up at the sky? Jesus might be gone for now, but he’s coming back someday! Y’all go on home now."

This last commandment of Jesus to his followers to be His witnesses to the world around them ought to be the mission statement of every group of believers who call themselves a part of the Body of Christ, the church. It answers our question, "What’s the church supposed to do now that the excitement of Easter has died down?" The assignment is to witness! And our witnessing doesn’t have to be complicated or extraordinary. You don’t have to go to seminary and get ordained to be a witness for Christ. All you have to do is testify to what you know, to what you have seen and heard, to the impact Jesus Christ has had on your life. Talk about your individual experience with Jesus. Invite people to come to church with you.

We don’t have any trouble talking with friends about anything else. We can sit and talk about the weather for half an hour, and yet we say we cannot spend 5 minutes telling someone for which we claim to have feelings about the most important decision they will ever make in their lives? Something is wrong with this picture.

Now, those early followers of Jesus didn’t make a mad dash back to Jerusalem and start preaching on street corners. They returned to join with other believers in worship and prayer, to actively wait together for the coming of the Holy Spirit, which occurred on the day of Pentecost. If you don’t know, that’s next Sunday, fifty days after Easter. Notice that I said actively waiting. That means they didn’t JUST pray for the coming of the Spirit.

The witness of scripture tells us that while they waited, they worshiped, they preached, they elected someone to replace Judas – in other words, they got ready to roll up their sleeves and go to work. They didn’t want to waste Easter, you know?

With not one single Easter lily in sight, with the shouts of "Christ is Risen!" only faint echoes, there IS something to be done after all the excitement of Easter and the Resurrection have died down. God’s people, the followers of Jesus Christ, are given the command to witness to all the world.

And so, on this seventh Sunday of Easter, as we await the great festival of Pentecost, I challenge each of you to devote yourselves to prayer in the week that lies ahead. Let all of God’s people commit themselves to this active, prayerful waiting. But when the Spirit has come upon YOU, you’d better get to work. You wouldn’t want to waste Easter, would you? AMEN